In the fall of
1960, I.D. magazine published a New
York–themed issue. In our zeal to avoid the usual metropolitan clichés, we looked for
aspects of the city that had not yet been “special issued” to death. At the time,
Olivetti was universally acknowledged as a model of corporate design
leadership, and the sidewalk in front of its sleek showroom on Manhattan’s
Fifth Avenue featured a marble pillar supporting an Olivetti Lettera 22
portable typewriter. I don’t remember whether pedestrians were invited to try
it out or whether they just did it spontaneously, but the machine was heavily
and often revealingly used. A lot of people predictably wrote, “Now is the time
for all good men to come to the aid of their country,” but some wrote personal
letters and even poetry. Once every hour someone came out of the showroom and
rolled a fresh sheet of paper into the machine. The manager generously agreed
to save a few week’s worth of anonymous contributions to run in the magazine.

New York has the only machine in the
world that writes poetry and it is characteristic that the machine itself is
foreign…. Here is something it wrote last week:

Do away with
the dubways

Only the insane
ride the sibways.

Plant mushrooms
in the tunnels.

Plant mushrooms
in the tunnels.

Typos
notwithstanding, it’s not bad for an untrained portable, without help of parent
or teacher. It was clear
that a typewriter, like a chair or a car, was an artifact capable of inspiring
affection. Antique dealers know that they can always increase traffic by
putting an Underwood portable in the window.

By the time the
digital age caught up with me (I have never caught up with it) I had graduated
from a manual to an IBM Selectric. When I bought my first computer I called my
local typewriter store and asked what I could get for the Selectric, which was
in perfect condition. The answer was discouraging.” It has no resale value,
regardless of condition,” I was told. “But since it’s fairly new, I’ll give you fifty bucks for parts.”

Parting with it
was not as traumatic as getting it in the first place, which had meant making
the tearful transition from an Olympia that sat patiently and silently on my
desk while I waited for ideas to come.

Often they didn’t. I couldn’t stand the Selectric’s humming
into my ear, reminding me of how desperate I was and filling me with guilt over
missed deadlines and fear that the summoned ideas never would appear. The
manual had made noise too, but only when I pounded it. Since I am a two-fingered typist my
pounding was not incessant, and the resulting clatter was not annoying. Still,
I never thought of it as attractive until my friend Cheryl Yau, preparing to
write a design analysis of the Olivetti Lettera 21, decided to buy one, seduced
not only by its elegance but by the clatter that sounds so romantic in old
movies about the newspaper business. She didn’t get one, having been out-bid on
eBay, and her disappointment emphasized that an artifact presumably made
obsolete decades ago, has not entirely lost its luster.

There is a
resurgence of interest in, and sales of, typewriters by people who already own
one or more of the devices that replaced them. The New York Times reported:

In the last three months, type-ins have clattered into
cities from coast to coast and even overseas. On Feb. 12, more than 60 people
turned up at a Snohomish, Wash., bookstore over the course of three hours for a
type-in called Snohomish Unplugged. Type-ins have popped up in Seattle, Phoenix
and Basel, Switzerland...

Some of this
surely is related to the renewed interest in cooking from scratch, home
schooling, and DIY—or almost Y—eschewing Design Within Reach and reaching
instead for parts from IKEA that can be cobbled together for short-term use. And
some is purely nostalgic. But that’s not the whole story. Typewriters, like
bicycles and Newtonian physics, still work.

Before it was
on the way out, the typewriter had a hard time getting in. At least into
private offices. Typewriters were parked outside on secretarial desks. And when
computers began to make inroads into businesses, they were equally unwelcome.
Word processors looked too much like typewriters! Executives were embarrassed
to sit near any machine that connoted secretarial work. And besides, most of
them didn’t know how to use a keyboard, even with two fingers.

When I was
overseas, well-meaning friends and relatives kept writing to ask what I needed.
Not cigarettes; I didn’t smoke. Not edibles; they rarely survived the voyage.
But one day I saw a newspaper ad for a Hermes portable that was described as
the lightest typewriter ever made. I asked my indulgent parents to get me one. They
did, probably hoping it would provide an incentive to write letters home more
often, and I carried it around the South Pacific for the next three years.

Occasionally
one meets or hears about writers who pride themselves on not using computers,
triggering memories of writers who refused, for similar reasons, to use
typewriters when they were the most efficient alternative to pens. In college I
had a professor who had written several books and by the time I graduated had
written several more. I was
enviously dazzled by his productivity, and utterly flabbergasted when I discovered
that he wrote in longhand.

“Wouldn’t a
typewriter be faster?” I asked.

“I suppose so,”
he said. “But I can’t think any
faster than I can write, so the additional speed wouldn’t help.”

The
contemporary affection for typewriters may be a passing fancy, but it isn’t
necessarily fancy. One reputed advantage of the typewriter is its simplicity. I have always been attracted to objects, like the strawberry huller, that can only do one thing. A typewriter cannot cannot find information, take photographs, produce a spreadsheet, tell you who’s following you on Twitter, play podcasts, find tax loopholes, flood you with apps or remind you that three friends have birthdays coming up. All it can do is enable you to type. With however many fingers are equal to the task.

About the Author:

Ralph Caplan is the author of Cracking the Whip: Essays on Design
and Its Side Effects and By Design. Caplan is the former editor of
I.D. magazine, and has been a columnist for both I.D. and Print. He lectures widely, teaches in the graduate Design Criticism program at the School of Visual Arts, was awarded the 2010 “Design Mind” National Design Award by the Cooper-Hewitt
and is the recipient of the
2011 AIGA Medal.